


Solace

by FHC_Lynn, Rizobact



Series: Ironclad [2]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Challenge Response, Cops, Gen, Pre-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-03
Updated: 2016-03-03
Packaged: 2018-05-24 11:13:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6151849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FHC_Lynn/pseuds/FHC_Lynn, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rizobact/pseuds/Rizobact
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a mission goes horribly wrong, Ironhide tracks Prowl down to comfort his young friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Solace

**Author's Note:**

> Written together for the RP challenge in our writing group. The goal was to do a role play with another member and use it to create a short story. Off screen original character death.

The first to arrive and the last to leave, Prowl had headed the crowd of officers watching the transport take what had been their friend to the morgue for his last processing and rites. It had been Prowl’s team, his assistant. And when, after the crowd dispersed in shuffling pedes and slumped shoulders under a cloud of muted whispers, Prowl vanished on him, Ironhide just banged his head on a wall.

Not the wunderkind Prowl was, Ironhide had still been running investigations and stings since long before Prowl had been in the glare of someone’s optic. The young mech turned to high grade so rarely, the circumstances became predictable. Looking down through the curbside window, Ironhide dismissed the possibility now.

Prowl wouldn’t go for a drunken binge. Not now. Escape. And the bottom of a bottle would not do.

Ironhide tracked him down at the race track. Long after the stars had cleared out, the track made extra money letting some folks wear themselves out on it. After signing a waiver about injuring themselves, of course. At this hour of the dead shift, only one racer circled around down there. Black and white, but painted in misery.

Leaning against the railing of one of the crew pits, Ironhide knew Prowl had spotted him. And he knew he’d been dismissed for the moment. Ironhide waited the mech out. It hadn’t been Prowl’s fault. But he knew Prowl blamed himself. The kid took everything so deep.

It took several laps before Prowl had room in the racing thoughts in his processor to really think about Ironhide’s presence. He had been trying to outrun the what-ifs, the should-haves, the if-onlys without any success.The weight of them crowded everything else out except for the physical sensation of the track beneath his tires and the wind streaming over his plating.

Eventually, however, the peripheral awareness grew to the point that it helped break the loop he was in enough to begin slowing down. He took a few more laps at a more reasonable pace to let his systems cool before pulling off to the side and braking fully. He stopped a short distance away from Ironhide but didn’t transform, torn between feeling grateful and irritated to see him.

Ironhide inched out from behind the railing. He had no desire to send Prowl running again. Ironhide knew the mech had enough in his head. On the track, he crouched beside his young friend’s alt mode but looked out at the track. After a moment, “Picked a nice one. The one over on the west side of town ain’t as good for a hard run. Not that I race, but I do like watching.”

After a moment, he sat back on the track and, now, looked down at Prowl. He didn’t reach for the mech, not yet. Prowl twitched and sometimes skittered away from reassuring gestures. Made Ironhide sad, but he would deal with things as they fell. “So, you worn out enough for a drink, or did you want to scream at someone? Me, I go with screaming. Feels like letting something out, you know?”

Screaming about things might be cathartic in some ways, but Prowl didn’t like to lose control like that; it was unproductive and unprofessional. Of course, bottling everything up inside the way he did generally meant that the pressure built up until it finally got to be too much and there was nothing he could do to prevent it from happening.

Some mechs had told him he needed to develop better coping methods. Right now, as close to exploding as he was, that thought in combination with Ironhide’s gentle probing was enough to light the fuse.

“It should not have happened!” Prowl growled, both his vocalizer and his engine rumbling angrily. “The mission was straightforward, everyone knew their positions and their assignments.” The need to move again had his tires twitching, but instead of taking off once more around the track he transformed and began pacing restlessly. He let his steps fall loudly, punctuating his speech. “There should not have been any problems! The statistical odds of everything going wrong _precisely_ the way they needed to for this to happen were infinitesimal!”

“There shouldn’t’ve been problems, Prowl,” Ironhide agreed, keeping his tone quiet and soothing. He wanted the mech to continue his explosion. Better to get it all out, have it screamed out into the void, than keep it all inside. Ironhide had decided long ago, Prowl was the type to bleed inside if no one watched him. Bleed out too much, and, Ironhide knew, a mech didn’t come back. They walked and talked, but the fire never burned again. “Crankshaft wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Vector wasn’t where _he_ was supposed to be. Can’t plan for something you don’t know.”

He didn’t think that would help Prowl, not right away. Honestly, he expected that would spur on the mech’s anger. Because it _should have been_ planned for. That Prowl hadn’t had the information to feed his overclocked brain didn’t matter.

Ironhide knew how much being responsible sucked, sometimes.

“They were told to radio in if they changed positions!” Prowl’s volume increased with each word so that by the end of the sentence he was truly shouting. “We weren’t operating without communications! It was supposed to be quick and simple -- everyone was to relay back what I needed to coordinate everything and prevent _exactly what happened!_ ”

The only thing wrong with the track was there was nothing readily available to throw. Prowl clenched his hands into fists instead, forcing himself to hold them at his sides rather than trying to take a swing at anything. It would only damage his hands. Though right about now, he felt like he deserved the pain.

His rage didn’t deflate so much as redirect as he continued, his door wings dropping their angle from the aggressive position they’d been at a moment ago as he berated himself instead of his team. “There’s no excuse for not putting in better contingencies. I should have made the plan more flexible, accounted for a higher margin of error in the calculations.”

“And just how could you have done that and kept that eighty-five percent chance of catching the targets?” Ironhide asked reasonably. While he didn’t have quite the processor his young friend did, he had done this work so long his mind had begun to work out that the same things kept repeating themselves into infinity.

Ironhide let it go as stupid mechs were predictable. It was the smart ones, like Prowl, one had to watch out for. However governed by habit, they had much more capacity to think creatively. And act on those ideas. Ironhide continued, “Look, I listened to you make those plans. Nothing else would have lead to capture. That’s why you came down so hard about communication beforehand. That’s why you picked a location where only an enforcement comm system wouldn’t be jammed by the local electrical interference. All anyone had to do was follow the plan and communicate changes.”

“Which they didn’t, and I didn’t take that into account adequately,” Prowl countered. “I should have spent more time on it; maybe if I had looked harder I could have found a way to preserve the odds of success without as much risk to the team.” He kicked at the ground angrily. “Especially since I knew Vector would be there. He has - _had,_ ” the word crackled with static, “a history of diverging from the mission plan. I _knew_ that! So why did this happen?”

Prowl didn’t even know who to be angry at anymore. His confusion was evident in his trembling frame and jagged EM field, and it manifested in anger at everyone...even the mech trying to help him. “If you saw me making the plans, why didn’t you say something when you saw me making that mistake?” He rounded on his companion, lashing out because he was there, not because it would make a difference. “Or did you decide that I would learn better by letting it play out like this?”

Ironhide got to his pedes slowly and thought about his answer before giving it. Prowl needed the truth, but how a mech presented that truth could frag a mind up. No, Ironhide approached his answer carefully. “I did _not_ . Vector’d been warned before that veering off plan could cause huge problems, right? We knew he had a history. You spent months on that plan before peeling off everything for last night’s raid when you got the go ahead. There wasn’t another way. You’d already been through that. I thought he’d listen to you, because that’s part of our job. I didn’t think anything needed saying. You can’t be responsible for someone else’s mistakes, Prowl. Not even when they get themselves killed. You called the plan. You worked it in your head again and again to keep your mechs safe. If everyone had been where they were supposed to be, Vector would still be alive. _Your plan_ would have worked, if _he_ hadn’t changed things.”

Prowl’s posture finally relaxed just slightly, an indicator that he was considering the words alongside everything else rather than dismissing them outright. “It was still _my_ plan and _my_ responsibility to bring everyone back alive - both the targets, and the team.” He spoke at a more reasonable volume again as well, though his voice was still strained. “I am the one who has to explain to the captain and to Vector’s family that I failed to protect him.”

It was distasteful to blame one’s failings on others, especially if they couldn’t defend themselves. Prowl would have had no difficulty reaming Vector out for his mistake privately if things had gone differently, but such was not the case. Prowl took his responsibility for the mechs under him very seriously, and he was just as hard on himself as he was on them

“He failed to protect himself, Prowl. Without knowing where he was, how could you have protected him from that blast? Run it by your tactical suite. It’ll give you a slim to none chance,” Ironhide sighed.

Finally, Ironhide approached the kid and rested a hand on his shoulder. “You will have to explain it to the captain. You’re right. Vector’s family might approach you. That’s possible. But you aren’t at fault for his actions. I’m not going to argue about your plans. But I gotta ask. How can you make adjustments when you aren’t given information? If someone under you deliberately disobeys you at a bad point? If you don’t have what you need, how are you at fault?”

Ironhide knew he wouldn’t have Prowl convinced by the end of the century, let alone the night, but the more he got the mech to run odds past his own incorruptible tac suite, the harder it would be for Prowl to sink into self-blame. That thing was all about numbers and accuracy. It would never lie.

Prowl glared up at Ironhide, but he didn’t shake off the other’s hand. His silence indicated that he was taking the older mech’s advice, running the numbers again searching for a different answer. His deepening frown indicated he found none.

“I acted based on the faulty assumption that Vector and Crankshaft were where they were meant to be. Had I known they were not at their assigned posts sooner, I would have run an analysis to suggest the most likely course of their deviations. Running that analysis now with the information I had available at the time correctly predicts Crankshaft taking the action that he did, but it places Vector circling around the outbuilding rather than making his way directly toward the main building as he did.” Compared to his earlier shouting, the statement sounded remarkably flat - simple fact with no emotion attached to it.

The lack of satisfaction with that fact followed soon after, but it wasn’t as strong as the overpowering anger and guilt that had spurred Prowl on to the track in the first place. “Mathematically, I am not at fault. That does not change that I am still responsible.”

“So you shouldn’t have trusted them to work within the plan? Knowing your plan meant to keep everyone safe during a dangerous takedown? It’s a sign of a good mech that you feel that way, Prowl. You care about your team. They _know_ that. But you can’t beat yourself over it when _they_ don’t listen and put everyone at risk. Tell me. What did _you_ do when you first realized Vector had been shot?”

Ironhide already knew. His team arriving as back up when it all turned to slag, he had been the one to calm Crankshaft, to listen to the mech babble in shock about it. That poor rookie would be on leave for his mental health, but Ironhide had heard a new respect for his commanding officer mixed in with the newfound horror. But making _Prowl_ say it would help the mech. The numbers in his own head hadn’t made all the decisions; it took a spark to feel strongly enough to risk itself.

Prowl didn’t answer immediately, but eventually he responded. “I confirmed the positions of the others and had several of them fall back to form a wider perimeter and provide cover fire,” he said slowly, evaluating his actions anew as he spoke. “Then I took the remaining mechs in with me to attempt a retrieval while trying to flank the targets and cut off their access to their reserve ammunition.”

That had been where everything else had fallen apart. Vector getting himself shot had been the first stone of what had turned into a deadly avalanche. Reconstructing a mission on the spot in the middle of the strike was never ideal, and Prowl had tried to prioritize rescuing Vector without losing their targets. It had placed him in the line of fire sooner than he’d planned and with less back up, but the increased confusion had meant increased chances of some of the criminals escaping if he hadn’t made sure of all the exits.

Crankshaft being temporarily taken hostage hadn’t been part of the new plan and had forced yet another shift in strategy. It shouldn’t have involved Vector, but the mech hadn’t been any better about staying down and looking after himself after an injury that should have sidelined him. A short, intense scuffle had gotten Crankshaft back, but when they had returned for Vector he was no longer where they had left him.

“After subduing several hostiles I had Pointblank escort Crankshaft out while I lead the rest in a search for the remaining targets. Vector found them first.” Alone and already hurt, Vector had found them first. He hadn’t been able to get away, and Prowl had been too late to rescue him. “I couldn’t save him.”

“So twice Vector disobeyed orders meant to keep him safe. And you went in after him, twice, risking yourself on point,” Ironhide responded. Prowl hadn’t said, but Crankshaft _had_ , and Ironhide knew Prowl well enough to believe it hadn’t been a glitch in the rookie’s thoughts. “The only thing I can see that you might, _might_ , have done different is leave someone to take Vector out of the strike. But you needed them to help free Crankshaft. It couldn’t wait for backup, because you’d already had shots fired. No one was going to get there fast enough. The situation wasn’t supposed to need more mechs. The chain of command exists for a reason. And it ain’t for annoying young folk looking for glory. I don’t want you to feel like you shouldn’t care, Prowl. But it isn’t your fault.”

He gave the younger mech a gentle shake, gaze settling on the wings at Prowl’s back. Often they told what was really going on in the mech’s head. Ironhide also wanted to make sure Prowl knew he wasn’t alone. Fingers might be pointed later. Anger and hurt always caused some sort of backlash. His own experience with death and failure had taught him that. But he didn’t want Prowl coming out as jaded as Ironhide sometimes felt. He wanted Prowl to always care.

The set of those panels said that Prowl still felt more than his fair share of guilt over the incident, and perhaps a bit of apprehension too. He knew as well as Ironhide that there would be fallout of some kind after the situation had been reviewed in full, and he was expecting to catch heat over it.

“I do not know that it will be seen that way,” he said, sounding more tired than anything else. “I do, however, appreciate your support.” A flicker of gratitude uncontaminated by resentment or irritation passed through his EM field, there just long enough for Ironhide to be able to tell he hadn’t imagined it. “Thank you.”

“You’re a good mech, Prowl. Life outside of calculations ain’t neat and tidy.” Sighing, he tugged Prowl close. As much as it irked the Praxian, Ironhide pulled them into an awkward hug. He let his own field reach out to back up what he had said. The more ways he said it, the more ways Prowl would hear. “You did the best you knew. You won’t make the same mistakes, because you won’t trust the same way again. That’s sad, if you ask me, but I know you. And I’m not going to gripe about what gets you through your days. Just listen, sometimes. And remember I trust you. Okay?”

As usual, Prowl held himself stiff in the larger mech’s embrace for a long moment before relaxing, ever so slightly, in his arms. “No, I will not make the same mistakes. I will be better next time.” His helm tilted down, hiding his face. “I wish it had gone differently,” he said quietly. “Vector was a good officer.” It was tantamount to saying he would miss him, though the actual admission never emerged.

“Vector was a good officer,” Ironhide agreed. “So are _you_. I want you to remember that. Terrible as this was, we can all learn from it. Okay? And I know you did everything you could with what you had.”

Carefully, knowing how sensitive the flicking panels could be, Ironhide ran a hand up and down Prowl’s back, breaking his own rhythm to pat gently between the joints. “Right now, I want you to come with me. You need some fuel and a quiet place. I know you won’t cycle down for a rest, and that’s okay right now. But you’re gonna need more time to think about how to prevent it from happening again, yeah? And not let the guilt eat at you. Don’t argue clauses at me either. This ain’t about trying to coddle you. We ain’t fraternizing. It’s me trying to see a good mech through a tough time. All right?”

“I am beyond resenting your ‘helpful’ intrusions,” Prowl managed, almost a joke even though his frame language and field both read as exhausted and unhappy. He certainly had no intentions of stopping the replays and reevaluations still running in his processor, but the mention of fuel had other systems making themselves known for the first time in joors.

Pulling away enough to look up at Ironhide again, Prowl nodded. “Energon would probably be wise,” he acknowledged. His levels were flashing low after his exertions in the field and the strain of overclocking his processor for so long, not to mention the laps he’d done around the track. “Afterwards, however, I need to return to the precinct. I have things I need to finish and see to.”

“I think you’d do better with some quiet first.” Ironhide wouldn’t try to order Prowl around, because the kid resented that treatment. He put his hands on his hips and settled for a parental loom, though, dropping any pretense of dignity for the moment. “But let’s go get something in your belly at least, huh? You’re looking run-down. C’mon. Exit’s over yonder.”

While Prowl would never, ever laugh at him in public, Ironhide hoped for a smile. Just a hint that the kid would be okay, in the long run, would ease Ironhide’s own mind.

Ironhide’s posturing was met with the barest tick at the corner of Prowl’s mouth and a slight brightening of his optics, which had been glowing dully once the sparks of anger had drained away. “I am aware,” he said calmly. “It is how I came in. Did you have a particular place in mind?” Prowl knew that Ironhide had several different places he frequented after hours that served various forms of energon, and while not all of them fit the bill of quiet, enough of them did that he wasn’t able to narrow it down to a single likely establishment. Not without any other factors to go on, at any rate, though adding ‘nearby’ to the list of criteria reduced the possibilities to a short list of only three.

“Let’s do to Fastball’s. The booths have curtains, and I’m guessing you’d like more privacy than not, yeah?” Freeing a hand from his posturing, he used it to turn Prowl around to the door. He let his relief and his empathetic pain flicker through his field before dismissing it in favor of his concern. Mech needed to know someone cared more than he needed to be understood, to Ironhide’s mind. Few had quite Prowl’s genius, and that always left the kid feeling isolated.

And _that_ he sympathized with all too well.

Prowl let Ironhide steer him, his door wings flicking a non-verbal agreement as they made their way out of the track. He increased the distance between them before they reached the street, but it was a physical distance, not the huge gulf created by grief, loss, and self-recrimination.

He turned to Ironhide one more time just before they transformed to make the short drive. “I am glad the team they sent to assist me was yours.”


End file.
